Planet Jr.

Over the years we’ve got our hands on a couple old Planet Jr catalogs that are quite a joy to peruse. This particular Planet Junior catalog was published in 1934 and includes a wide range of farm and garden tools. These catalogs are a great read because they’re written like a book with descriptions and guidelines for how to use every implement to help the user grow their own food. Although in black and white, the photos provide great detail for how the tools are intended to be used.

It’s incredible how a tool like the Wheel Hoe has stood the test of time and it is equally as useful today as it was 100 years ago. As the this catalog states, “Few gardens are too small to require a wheel hoe as it will save more than enough time and labor to pay for itself in the first year.” This couldn’t be more true. There’s just not another tool that you will find that allows you to do so much in your vegetable garden with little effort. This is also probably why the design has hardly changed at all in over 100 years of it’s existence.

The Planet Jr Single Wheel Hoe

Planet Jr Single Wheel Hoe

When we started Hoss Tools, we sought to design a Wheel Hoe that was very similar to the time-tested design of the Planet Jr Wheel Hoe. The only significant improvement we made was including oil impregnated bronze bushings into the wheels to improve durability. Our steel parts are also powder coated, but of course powder-coating wasn’t available in the early 1900s either.

The Planet Junior Single Wheel Hoe was available in several different packages which included the No. 16, No. 17, No. 17 1/2, and No. 18. According to the catalog, “The No. 16 is the most completely equipped Planet Jr. Single Wheel Hoe. ” When this catalog was published, you could purchase a No. 16 Single Wheel Hoe for a whopping $8.50! And although the value of the dollar has changed quite a bit since 1934, the quality of this Wheel Hoe hasn’t.

While on an online gardening forum recently, I was reading an exchange between two people who were posting their personal wheel hoe review and commenting on the utility of the Wheel Hoe. One of them was criticizing the Wheel Hoe as an outdated piece of equipment that was “too much work,” while the other was explaining the benefits of using a Wheel Hoe in their garden. While using personal experience for support, the Wheel Hoe proponent also posted a wheel hoe review which included couple of paragraphs directly quoted from a book published in 1917 titled “Around the Year in the Garden” by Frederick Frye Rockwell. When I read these quotes, I knew I had to find this book!

I did some rigorous online searching and found only two original copies of the book, and purchased both. The photo above is one of the copies and the other has a blue cover with the same cover artwork. The book is written in a diary format and details the author’s year around his garden and farm. He describes every process from preparation, planting, harvesting, and what to do during those dreary winter months.

The photo above from the book shows a Double Wheel Hoe being used with Plow attachments to create a furrow for planting potatoes. Once potatoes are planted, the Plow attachments can be turned outward and the Double Wheel Hoe will cover and hill the planted potatoes. When speaking about what tools a gardener should have, he says:

“Even the smallest gardens should have a wheel hoe in its tool outfit … As it is a machine that you will probably use in the garden more than all your other tools put together, be sure to get one capable of doing all the work you may have to give it.”

We couldn’t agree more with this wheel hoe review more! The Wheel Hoe is just as useful today as it was 100 years ago. And with all the Attachments that we have available, you can be sure that it will cover all of your gardening needs from cultivating, furrowing, planting, hilling and weeding. Rockwell goes on to talk about using a Double Wheel Hoe versus a Single Wheel Hoe. This is a frequent question we receive from people wondering which Wheel Hoe suits them best. Rockwell explains it perfectly:

“The double-wheel hoe has a distinct advantage over the single-wheel in that the rows can be straddled, permitting very close work while the plants are small and accordingly cutting down the laborious task of hand weeding. If your garden is at all large the amount of time you will save in weeding it the first time with a double-wheel hoe instead of with a single wheel hoe will make you satisfied with the slight additional investment.”

He then talks about maybe the most important attachment of all, the Seeder or “seed drill” (pictured above) as he calls it. In a complete paragraph, he insists:

“By all means get a wheel hoe with a seed-drill combination. Life is too short, garden space is too valuable, the work of thinning plants and cultivating uneven rows is too costly, to justify anyone’s planting a garden by hand. When you can mark the row, open the furrow, drop the seed, cover it, roll it, and get it straight, in one operation, as fast as you can walk, the laborious task of hand-sowing seeds like onions, carrots, beets or turnips is out of the question. In addition to doing the job better and infinitely faster, covering all the seeds with fresh earth and dropping them at uniform depth, the seed drill leaves the row neatly rolled on top, so that you can see where to cultivate before the plants are up.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. The Seeder attachment for the Wheel Hoe will perhaps save you more time than any other attachment because it is able to perform so many operations in one pass of walking down the row. As evidenced by the wheel hoe review in this book and our continued use, the Wheel Hoe is a time tested piece of equipment that is a must-have item for everybody from the small backyard gardener to the market farmer. With the Seeder and other attachments you can prepare, plant, weed and maintain your garden with the Hoss Wheel Hoe. Our Wheel Hoe is MADE IN THE USA and built to last. Here’s to 100 more years of Wheel Hoe gardening!

The Planet Jr Cultivator Line is a Philadelphia maker of one-horse farming tools who has undeniably gone beyond the almost insatiable marketplace for small-range farming implements in 1980. S.L. Allen Company continually developed its niche in American Agricultural built-up whose success demonstrated the innate brilliance of Jonathan Robinson and other mid-century creators of tools helpful to farmers. Beginning in the late 1870s, the firm has focused on the recreational gardeners as well as one-horse farmers, thriving as suburbanization gathered force, but ensued later by serving a large group of farmers. During that time, they somehow failed at getting the attention of government researchers to allow themselves to introduce their tools in a wide realm of agriculture.

For the better part of its history, the Planet Jr Cultivator firm highlighted its push wheel hoes and automatic seed drills, devices set with all sort of gadgets and practically hard to describe at that time. During then, wheel hoes turn up with one wheel or two: single wheel gear normally ran between rows of foliage and cut off or ripped up weeds on either side.

In 1930, the firm has finally completed its project resolving the horseless one-horse farmers. They made the garden tractor which has significantly reduced all needs for horse-powered tools used for land cultivation and also abolished the need for pushed tools as well. The garden tractor, powered by gasoline, had two metal wheels and snapped iron add-ons when it crashed into buried rocks on the ground. It was not until the 1930’s when they felt the need to compete and developed farming tools for the three groups of users: large-scale cultivators, pleasure gardeners, and small-scale farmers. Government researchers have backed the developing firm and gave emphasis on the advantages of wheel hoes on land cultivation. They broke out into an agricultural sphere not just of one-horse cultivators but also of no-horse farmers, half-horse farmers and wheel hoe farmers. They studied the works of the inventors beyond the notice of trade name agricultural science and technology.

To learn more about the Hoss Wheel Hoe and other gardening tools visit HossTools.com.